


Why So Scandalous?

by scribblesandscreeds



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Meta, Nonfiction, Other, Research
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-23 14:06:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16160441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblesandscreeds/pseuds/scribblesandscreeds
Summary: Who was the real Irene Adler? There has been much speculation over the years that she may have been based on a real person, and many candidates for who that real person was put forward - but a 2013 article in The New Yorker led me to, I think, the strongest contender.





	Why So Scandalous?

Seeking the real-life Irene Adler

 

 

To begin with, let’s be very clear on one point - it is not that Holmes felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. But the King of Bohemia once did. Five years later, he was ashamed of it and paranoid about the possibility of anyone finding out - so paranoid that he personally hired Sherlock Holmes to winkle out the only piece of evidence(a photograph of the two of them together) that proved it had happened. Evidence that remained in the possession of Irene Adler from start to finish, and beyond, because what made Adler so extraordinary and admirable to Holmes was the fact that she conclusively and definitively outwitted him without even breaking her stride.

 

Why was the King of Bohemia so afraid of word getting out that he had once - as a twenty-five year old Crown Prince - become entangled with Irene Adler?

He claims that his anxiety is caused by the fact that he is to be married to Clotilde von Saxe-Meiningen, second daughter to the King of Scandinavia, who is “the very soul of delicacy”, and any shadow of a doubt as to his conduct “would bring the matter to an end”. We seem to be asked to believe that her family’s moral principles are so strict that they will not accept a husband for their daughter if there is evidence which suggests that he isn’t a virgin.

This seems very strange, and barely credible. Young princes were notorious playboys in the nineteenth century, and opera singers well known to frequently be their mistresses1. Crown Princes having affairs with opera singers(and ballerinas, and actresses, as well as the more traditional wives of their aristocratic friends) was standard. The King of Scandinavia might not have approved, but it’s doubtful that his future son-in-law having once had a mistress who was long since out of the picture(except for - well - the picture he’s so worried about) would be an indiscretion that he would jettison a potentially politically advantageous match for. There would surely have to be something unspokenly outrageous about Irene Adler for revelation of her existence to imperil the match five years after her involvement. Something that a photograph would lay bare. Something that would actually change the nineteenth century’s Scandinavian King’s impression of the Bohemian one. 

There may well be something rooted in reality, which readers of the time didn’t need to be told, and which today might raise more of a scandal that he’d thought it necessary to cover up than that the affair had ever happened.

 

Meet Irene Aldridge.2

Her father was the globally successful New York-born African American actor and self-publicist extraordinaire Ira Aldridge; her mother, Swedish singer and socialite Amanda von Brandt. 

Like her mother, Irene Luranah Pauline Aldridge3 was an opera singer - a dramatic contralto once described by French composer Charles Gounod4 as possessing “one of the most beautiful voices that exist(s)”5.

Though considerably more racially diverse than we are given to believe by popular culture of the past century or so, Victorian London was not an easy place to be a black performer trying to get ahead and be taken seriously in the white-dominated industry of classical music6. Though racism may have tended more towards exotification than subjugation, it was there. That Irene, as a mixed race woman, was able to win universal praise7 for her London concerts in the 1890s was no mean feat. 

Irene Aldridge had the nerve, talent, and drive to get onto the Covent Garden stage - she could not have done so while keeping a low profile. Even if he only did the barest amount of research to flesh out Sherlock Holmes’s love of music, Arthur Conan Doyle cannot have failed to hear of her. Did he then write her into “A Scandal in Bohemia”, her surname trimmed of a couple of letters and addled into an anagram? It would seem to be a remarkable handful of coincidences if not. His young operatic contralto named Irene who had performed throughout Europe before coming to live in England bears more than a slight resemblance to the real young operatic contralto named Irene who performed throughout Europe before returning home to England.

 

Adler is not Aldridge in every detail, of course. Irene Adler, according to Holmes’s index, was born in 1858; Aldridge, 1860. Adler was from New Jersey; though the daughter of an American from within spitting distance of New Jersey, Aldridge was herself born in England. Adler is described in 1891 as having retired from the stage; Aldridge’s career was at that point blossoming.

The suggestion that she could have had a brief fling with a Crown Prince of Europe is not impossible, though. Her father claimed direct descent from royalty in Senegal, styling himself as a Fulani prince in exile, and her mother introduced herself as a Swedish baroness8. With a pedigree like that, why shouldn’t she take a prince for a lover?

Irene Aldridge was described in character as “a strong willed, dominating and pleasure-loving woman” as an aside in Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock’s biography of her father - a “soul of steel”, and “the mind of the most resolute of men”9, perhaps?

 

Without a time machine or a really, really good medium, it cannot be conclusively proven that Irene Aldridge was the direct inspiration for Irene Adler. All the details that point towards her are the similarity of her name, her profession, her age, her American background, and from what little material I’ve been able to Google, her likely notoriety at the time “A Scandal In Bohemia” was being written and read. It’s all circumstantial.

It would make a lot of sense, though. If Irene Adler was intended to be read as Irene Aldridge, then the King of Bohemia wasn’t terrified of people knowing he’d had an affair with an opera singer - he was an era-typical racist who was terrified of people knowing he’d had an affair with a mixed race woman. The potential for scandal in the photograph he tried so hard to get his hands on lay in the fact that it showed him posing with a woman who had clear African features. The “shadow of a doubt as to his conduct” wasn’t because he’d had sex, but who he’d had it with.

 

Would the readers have picked up on it? Well, if today you read a story about an opera singer called Katherine Jones, a ballerina called Darcy Boswell, or a quartet of marvellous actors called Chris Twitt, Chris Redwood, Chris Ewan and Chris Hamsey, you would have no trouble at all working out who had inspired those characters. In the same way, a reader in 1891 who knew a bit about the theatre - took the family to see The Nutcracker at Christmas, made the odd visit to the Savoy and ended up whistling all the airs from that infernal nonsense “Pinafore” for weeks on end, say - might pick up their copy of the Strand, turn to the first page of the new Sherlock Holmes story, and guess before the end of the first paragraph who “Irene Adler” was a thinly veiled portrait of.

 

Why was Irene Adler scandalous? Because she was black, and the King of Bohemia was a common-or-garden racist.

 

 

1 This was about the time that the Paris Opera was known as the “Brothel of France”(Deirdre Kelly’s “Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection”).

2I stumbled across her while falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole in search of a plausible background for a character I wanted to write into a canon compliant Sherlock Holmes story - someone who could conceivably be imagined as played by Lenora Crichlow, and have a good reason to speak French. That lead me to Senegal, which lead me to a list of prominent Fulani figures throughout history, which lead me to Ira Aldridge, which lead me to his daughter. What do we say about coincidence? That the universe is a feckless workshy layabout and it is that lazy _all the frickin’ time._  


3 Frequently known only as “Irene Luranah” or “Luranah Aldridge”, which possibly explains why no-one seems to have made this connection before - that, or my uncanny inability to Google has led me to think that I’ve discovered something which is actually common knowledge and I’m just making a fool of myself by presenting it as a revelation.  


4He of “Faust”, and most other titles mentioned in “The Phantom of the Opera”.  


5Alex Ross, “Othello’s Daughter”, in The New Yorker. Read it, there's a link below, it is fascinating.  


6It still, shamefully, is not.  


7Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s-1940s: Portrayal of the East  


8Of course both claims were wild fabrications for the sake of publicity and ticket sales, but that's never stopped anyone before. With both of her parents having made such lofty claims, false though they were, Irene Aldridge would have had to be implausibly humble and reticent(especially for a performer, elbowing her way to the top) to not take advantage of them.  
  
Ira Aldridge’s father was in fact a straw vendor and lay preacher in Manhattan; Amanda Brandt’s was a blacksmith in Västerås, so she had no legitimate business inserting a “von” into the middle of her name. In Ira’s case, as well as self-aggrandisement, this genealogical fantasy was a way of avoiding a peculiar sort of racism prevalent at the time. Africans directly from Africa were viewed as exotic and exciting; Africans via America were much scorned and derided. Pro-slavery propaganda was apparently effective on both sides of the Atlantic. This is likely why, even a generation later, the 1896 programme for the ill-fated Bayreuth Festival describes Irene as having physically come from Africa. (Ira Aldridge, the African Roscius, edited by Bernth Lindfors)  


9A Scandal in Bohemia

 

 

Other sources:  
[The Daughters of Ira Aldridge](https://louisehare.com/2016/07/15/the-daughters-of-ira-aldridge/)  
[Othello's Daughter](http://newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/29/othellos-daughter)  
[The Ohio Historical Society](http://dbs.ohiohistory.org/africanam/html/pagef0de.html?ID=2371&Current=P307)


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